Posted by:
elderolddog
(
)
Date: January 07, 2020 04:25PM
What I haven't told you is what I didn't know to tell you! I've never heard of this trilogy, as ghawd is my witness, and when have you ever caught him lying straight-faced 'til you cried?
I read the majority of the Wikipedia entry and decided that the list of primary characters would get the point across:
"Taking place in Unistat, which is the novel's parallel to the United States, the novels have intertwining plots involving a wide array of characters, including:
Epicene Wildeblood, a.k.a. Mary Margaret Wildeblood, a transsexual woman who throws great parties
Frank Dashwood, president of Orgasm Research
Markoff Chaney, a prankster
Hugh Crane, a.k.a. Cagliostro the Great, a mystic and magician
Furbish Lousewart V, author and President of Unistat
Marvin Gardens, author and cocaine addict
Eve Hubbard, scientist and alternate President of Unistat"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_Cat_TrilogyWikipedia also states that this trilogy is a continuation of some of the themes found in an earlier trilogy, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" described as a series of three novels by American writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, first published in 1975.[1] The trilogy is a satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati. The narrative often switches between third- and first-person perspectives in a nonlinear narrative. It is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture, numerology, and Discordianism."
Anyway, Wikipedia sort of flies off the handle in their definition of grok: "'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man."
Here's what Google says was RAH's meaning: "Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality."
So there...